The Bluestocking - holding the line and losing the thread

[lcakethereforeIam]

All women welcome, pull up a pygmy hog, the bargerbil will serve you a drink, the flying squirrels will bring you something to read and the goats will do...I'm not entirely sure.

There may be more than the usual amount of chaos as we transition to the new thread.

My wool stash is currently in the chest freezer after I spotted a moth. But I'm knitting a blanket using odd balls of mohair that turned up at craft club meetings when people brought ends of stashes in, striped with seven balls of dark green that I got in a charity shop.

Almost what you ordered, @MarieDeGournay!

When I last logged onto Ravelry, it was wall-to-wall Pride, progress flags and gender-woo. I eyerolled swiftly past to the actual patterns.

I block on carpet with decent underlay...
#cheapskate

On another topic... you sometimes encounter people who swear that dogs just want to be freeeee and only hang around people because we make them. I've been loitering on a bench at a nature reserve for about 10 mins. Batshit is lying on the grass listening to the birds and Brains is standing 4 feet away from me sniffing the air. There is a huge nature reserve, full of muntjac, pigeons, rabbits and squirrels there for the taking. A river. Open countryside. But here they are...

Thanks, Magpie.. I think
I think AI has shown a bit of human-ness there - OK I'll do you a picture of a woman from Days of Yore drinking with a straw, dress, hairdo yadda yadda..
oh I forgot to finish the left hand... ah feck it, it'll do, I'm off down the pub for a few scoops😄

The progress on the real Bluestocking has been a bit um.. desultory for a number of reasons, but I'll have a bit more free time after today - won't we all! and in the meantime you'll be glad to hear that the essentials are being delivered in advance of the official opening, under the watchful eye of Clarissa Capybara..

Hang on, it's not sensitive! Twitchy finger syndrome!

I think one of the few blue plaques in a town where I used to work was about a man who something, something screws. Just a sec....

Sir Joseph Whitworth, he was born in the town.

Do you ever see the start of a thread title on trending and finish off then check to see how close you are. Or perhaps you're feeling a little whimsical. Currently, 'Neighbour keeps feeding my child'...through the mangle? I'm scared to look.

I'm vaguely aware of him, we went to the gallery in his name earlier this year when we visited senior offspring at uni.

Whitworth the rifle man? I'm sort of vaguely aware of him from military history.

I have a whimsical project that I might never get around to, to write a historical novel about Rollo Gillespie. Hardly anyone these days has heard of him, but he was one of those mad eejits you used to get in the British Empire. Kind of a James Bond of the early 1800s, and if you told his exploits to someone who didn't know he was real, they'd think you were making him up because he sounds completely far fetched.

He's one of those people who could just fall through the cracks of historical fashion. He doesn't fit in with post-imperial Britain, and he's not the kind of man to be celebrated in Ireland despite being the most thoroughly Irish man you can imagine.

I'd never put together the Whitworth gallery with Screwy Whitworth, as I like to think his friends called him.

That would be an excellent nickname!

I've just read his Wikipedia entry. So many fingers, so many pies.

Well there are two names for me to Google, thank you Cake and Sionnach!

A quick glance at Joseph Whitworth's wiki entry looks fascinating, he looks like the Industrial Revolution personified! And his connection to screws is that he established a standard for screw threads, which must have contributed enormously to the success of British industry - interchangeability and all that.

Rollo Gillespie - a look at the Dictionary of Irish Biography resulted in a raised eyebrow - it says his mother
'was either the sister or daughter of James Bailie, MP for Hillsborough'.😧
and I chortled immaturely at
'in April 1783 was commissioned as a cornet in the 3rd Irish Horse'.
Three horses, but just one cornetto?😁

He reminds me of Lord Flasheart in Blackadder!

I do that too!
While copying the Tribunal Tweets reports over on The Other Thread, I had lots of oppos to do it as the 'chunks' of transcript often end in mid sentence, and as the day went on and it got more and more ...fevered, shall we say - there were all kinds of surreal ends to sentences forming in my brain as I waited for the next chunk of transcript!

Marie: Isn't knitting magical? I mean, it's just a long piece of wool and then x amount of time later it's a garment, or a toy animal or something..

After I'd learnt to crochet DH said to me that he couldn't get his mind around me using 'basically a stick & a piece of string' to make blankets. 😂 Female magic, darling!

Presumably they can smell the treats in your pocket?

That's weird - I've just started doing this & wondered if anyone else did.

Marie, I have a deep love of the Dictionary of Irish Biography, and I'm always thrilled to find a family member who made it into the DIB, for I know I'll get some good colour.

If I were wearing a feminist hat I'd mention pioneering journalist Catherine Drew, and ask why on earth I'd never heard of her...

...but I think my favourite is Philip Skelton. I keep meaning to get a copy of his biography. If the COI in the 18th century had an equivalent of Father Ted, he'd be in it - not as famous as Swift, but he made up for it in personality.

What are the criteria for appearing, do you know? I have an archbish in my family tree, not in the DIB, but he's still alive, so maybe that's it?

I don't know. Maybe you need to be dead to be in it.

I find it useful because it's good on clergy, and I have loads of them in my family tree. One of them is even in the Black Book of the United Irishmen - Rev James Porter, Presbyterian minister of Greyabbey, hanged for treason in 1798.

Can I just say about trending threads, there's a trending one on AIBU right now which is "Boyfriend made awful first impression with my parents and blames me"

That sent me down a rabbit hole of randomness. It reminded me of the novelist Cyra McFadden, and then I looked her up and discovered she'd died last year. (Cyra McFadden, 1937-2024, RIP)

Cyra, if she's remembered at all, is remembered for her 1977 novel The Serial, which got its name because, Charles Dickens stylee, she wrote it as a weekly serial for her local newspaper. It's a deliciously vicious satire of the post-hippie bourgeoisie of the California Bay Area.

The novel was loosely adapted into a movie in 1980. I haven't seen the movie in decades, but from memory I can't recommend it unless you have a really strong urge to see Christopher Lee play the leader of a gay biker gang.

Anyway, I thought of The Serial because, being written as a weekly newspaper feature, its chapters are short and concise. And it's got maybe the most magnificent description ever of a dad being introduced to his daughter's new boyfriend:

"Joan thought Spenser was a fox. Harvey thought Spenser was a weasel."

@lcakethereforeIam not with threads but my brain fills in WhatsApp messages that pop up on my mobile.

Well, they could. But I prefer to think it's love.

As for Dictionaries of National Biography, my lot did well to make it into the parish registers. My DGM came from a community obsessive about genealogy, but does her family appear in any of the published ones? Hell no. I know naff all about her mother, and not for want of trying. I'm not even sure what DGGM's actual surname was. And given where she was born, the odds are good that any overlooked records in a back room will by now have been eaten by termites.

My uncle incidentally is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Irish descent, and I assure you they are all still as mad as in the Victorian era. Not a Baron though. And still working on lil bits of round things that go in big things 🤷‍♀️my mother wanted me to become an engineer but it wasn't to be.

Irish records are very patchy, but there's a real sense of accomplishment when you dig something up.

A lot of my surprises have come from a DGGF who I never knew, who turns out to have been a bit of a rascal. He lived to nearly 100, had three wives none of whom knew about the others, and if DNA evidence is to be believed, had a side hustle of impregnating all his friends' wives.

I don't excuse his rascality, but I can't help thinking he would have been great fun to have a drink with.

I have one a bit like that Foxy. Both wives had predeceased him and his will left specific bequests to several women all of whom were apparently known as Mrs Him.